New York Times and Other Publishers Sue Brave Over Alleged Content Scraping

The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Monday in Manhattan federal court, accusing Brave, an 11‑year‑old privacy‑focused browser company, of scraping the newspaper’s copyrighted content and unlawfully providing it to customers identified as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere.

In the same filing, the Times describes Brave as a “supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” for AI companies, likening the browser to “a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties.”

The complaint says Brave created an index of more than 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler, which allegedly prevents publishers from blocking the browser’s access.

The lawsuit also targets a Brave browser feature that bypasses paywalls and the company’s practice of blocking publishers’ advertisements while selling its own ads.

Separately on Monday, the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit in the same Manhattan federal court, alleging comparable wrongdoing.

The New York Times, which has previously sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, is seeking an injunction and damages. The Times notes that Brave has raised roughly $250 million since its founding in 2015, according to private‑market trackers.

Brave has not responded to a request for comment.